I've been using KDE, and upon reccomendation I
tried FVWM as it's
lighter, but I had the same number (lots!) of xruns and problems. It did
run slightly better; I had 9 extra megs of ram free but realistically I
want no xruns. I'm not running a patched kernel as I'm unable to find
out what patches SUSE needs to run that conflict with the realtime
patches. My kernel is 2.6.11 atm. Any advice? Apologies as this is
id upgrade to a kernel that is less ancient. and try something like fluxbox or wmii. the
former at least has a panel with a system tray. which is most of what Gnome or KDE offers
for the desktop at significantly less cost. if you still want to load up a GUI file
manager now and then nothing is stopping you from installing Thunar...
xruns could be due to your preemption settings (in kernel .config) or video drivers. but
trimming the fat off your desktop can't hurt.